Oblique ranting
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caddymanMay be I am getting old and weary, I don’t know. I don’t feel it, most of the time and I should hope not, aged 48. At the risk of sounding trite or clichéd, 50 is the new 40, 60 is the new 50 etc. Age is as much a mental as a physical thing and I have long stated that I refuse to grow up, having seen what it does to people.
That said, I find myself tiring of the bright-eyed idealism and generally unrealistic world views of people I meet and who ought to know better. No-one objects to a kid (really anyone up to around 24-25 years old) looking upon their elders with exasperation because they refuse to do things personally and as a group that seem so simple and which would sort them and the world out properly, once and for all. Kids have no sense of history; everything is new and the answers are simple.
Most people are shaken out of this world view progressively between the ages of 20 and 30. They may hold on to their idealism to an extent, but they recognise that answers are hard to come by and certainly not easy. Despite that, a great many people fall back upon intellectual laziness and express trite opinions that their own experiences should lead them to question.
Let’s abandon this and adopt that. Why? Because it feels nice, or because it’s fluffy and the world should be pretty and pink and soft and not hard and pointy.
But when it all goes wrong and the pink and fluffy experiment fails and the shit hits the fan, it’s those who deal with the real world that have to come barrelling in and sort it out. Have a bit of idealism by all means, but let enough reality intrude to temper it with something workable.
That said, I find myself tiring of the bright-eyed idealism and generally unrealistic world views of people I meet and who ought to know better. No-one objects to a kid (really anyone up to around 24-25 years old) looking upon their elders with exasperation because they refuse to do things personally and as a group that seem so simple and which would sort them and the world out properly, once and for all. Kids have no sense of history; everything is new and the answers are simple.
Most people are shaken out of this world view progressively between the ages of 20 and 30. They may hold on to their idealism to an extent, but they recognise that answers are hard to come by and certainly not easy. Despite that, a great many people fall back upon intellectual laziness and express trite opinions that their own experiences should lead them to question.
Let’s abandon this and adopt that. Why? Because it feels nice, or because it’s fluffy and the world should be pretty and pink and soft and not hard and pointy.
But when it all goes wrong and the pink and fluffy experiment fails and the shit hits the fan, it’s those who deal with the real world that have to come barrelling in and sort it out. Have a bit of idealism by all means, but let enough reality intrude to temper it with something workable.